'No Hiding Place' - a Personal Map

'NO HIDING PLACE' - A PERSONAL MAP RESPONDING TO TREZZA AZZOPARDI'S EPONYMOUS NOVEL GEORGE SFOUGARAS 'NO HIDING PLACE' - A PERSONAL MAP This is my personal response to the Digital Literary Atlas of Wales and its Borderlands Project, organised and co-ordinated by Dr Jon Anderson, Lecturer in Human Geography, Cardiff University and Dr Kieron Smith Research Associate School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University. George Sfougaras Next two pages: Images from the screnprinted final piece. This is my response to the book entitled 'No Hiding Place' by Trezza Azzopardi. Trezza Azzopardi was born in Cardiff. She studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and is currently a lecturer there. Her acclaimed first novel, The Hiding Place (2000), is the story of a Maltese family living in Cardiff during the 1960s. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). The book was also adapted for BBC Radio 4's 'Book at Bedtime' and has been translated into 14 languages. I was fortunate to be selected as one of 12 artists Trezza Azzopardi's father was from Malta and my that would be commissioned to respond family are Greek. This duality creates fertile through art to a book that is considered ground for asking interesting questions, but not significant in the Literary Landscape of Wales necessarily finding answers. There is a tension in and its Borderlands. too many allegiances and in belonging to two cultures and to none. When the title of the book was given to me, I was somewhat surprised. I had not read this I hungrily read the book and became book, although I had been aware of it having submerged into the emotional landscape of the been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. novel. The setting had a very distinct physical aspect. Tiger Bay, Bute Town, the slums of the I could not wait to read it, and when I did, I old Cardiff docks. Old Victorian houses in various could not put it down. It described a stages of decay provided the backdrop for a dysfunctional family, living in a socially deprived human drama that one could not but feel drawn area in Tiger Town in Old Cardiff, near the docks. into. The smells of the surroundings, the dull, The landscape was unfamiliar to me joyless houses, purely functional, and then only experientially, but very resonant in terms of the just so; the logistics of keeping a family, when the human drama, the human drama and the sense main earner is a gambling, immoral and self- of asphyxiating poverty. absorbed loser; the innocent descriptions of the horrors of paternal neglect and violence. In addition, aspects of the behaviour of members of the family were familiar to me I had to try and capture this quickly, and so over through my work as a teacher with young people the period of several days, a 'Map' of sorts facing challenging health and family emerged. In the next few pages, I present the circumstances. I share something with the process and explain elements of this work and its writer. A sense of being or having been part of links with the novel. another community and culture. How this project fits into my body of work. I started to draw simple descriptive maps around May 2016. Their emergence and development were entirely unexpected. I can only suggest that they came from a deep need to revisit aspects of my past and to understand our family history. My mind turned to places and experiences that I have held onto, or more accurately filed for future reference. Echoes of my childhood and places half-remembered emerged in a simplified linear form, sometimes superimposed over archetypal faces of my younger self and my parents, or in the form of illustrations of places half forgotten, lost in time, or destroyed by war. A kind of alphabet that I had used in my previous graphic works became more clearly defined: boats are metaphors for change and transition, waves signify an arduous journey and trees stand for hope. Slowly this symbolism began to merge with remembered details of places and people from different times in my life, archival material and literature. Some time ago, I completed a series of prints which were grouped under the title 'Songs from My Father'. My father used to sing a lot to us when we were young, and I still remember the lyrics and melodies as if it was yesterday. My mother had stories of the family and of past times. Sometimes she told us fantastical tales of monsters and heroes, of historical happenings and myths. In this portrait of my mother, I incorporated some of these stories and my memories of her. The text in the background is by my favourite Greek writer, Menelaos Lountemis. My first reaction to the book after I completed it and sat there considering what I had just experienced is hard to describe. I had a sense of being wounded, or of something terrible having occurred to which I had been a witness, without realising it, and without the physical presence required to stop it. 'Skin' I thought. 'Skin' bruised, burned and cut, hurt but not cared for or loved. I wanted something that would give me that sense of organic matter and after a few sketches on paper and fabric, I decided to use large pasta sheets. These behaved in a very different way to paper and had the tactile quality of organic matter, or skin, without being grotesque. Hard to work on and even harder to manipulate, my experiments of drawing on and then shaping the pasta felt worthwhile at first. After a while, I found the perfect way to work on and shape the pasta, otherwise, it flakes, blisters and cracks as the temperature of the material changes. 'Frank' (right) ink on pasta sheet. After a few experiments, however, I started to feel that this was not ideal. It felt somewhat forced and unpredictable. The main issue in retrospect was the size of the sheets, which only allowed for very small oblong segments and therefore 'fragmented' the flow of an overarching design of a 'map' that would engage the viewer in a fluid way with aspects of the novel. Further down the line I would actually cut up and re-assemble the final print, but that is explained later in this book. Images opposite show the drawing on the pasta sheet, the 'moulding' of it over a metal rack, and finally, on the opposite page, the shaped, baked and fixed final outcome. I still had all the characters and ideas floating around in my head, of the abusive father, the poor disorientated and eventually irretrievably damaged mother and the sisters, each described through the eyes of the youngest Dolores, or Dol. The writer's face was fresh in my mind as were facts about her early life in Cardiff and her background; both of these aspects, the Maltese/Welsh origins and the evocative imagery of decaying slum dwellings seemed to be central to any visual work. I decided to move on to a larger format that would contain the many components of the novel. I used the face of the writer Trezza Azzopardi but simplified it into a graphic image. This allowed me to add detail to the shaded parts and still retain a likeness. In the writer's eyes, one has to look hard, but within them, albeit only discernible with some effort is the face of a man in a flat cap in an urban landscape. In the other eye, rows of decaying terraces await demolition. A cobbled street defines the shadow under the eye. I had to draw the eyes first, to ensure a passable likeness, otherwise, I felt that I could not really proceed. I moved on from there, slowly 'flooding' the rest of the pen and ink drawing with details gleaned from reading the book. These are details which moved me, personally. For the greatest part, I worked either from imagination and improvised from archival images of Tiger Bay. I worked straight on the paper using pen and archival ink. Twice, I felt I needed to draw something out in pencil to get the fit right, or to ensure a more realistic facial expression. These areas are the curved row of the Terraced dwellings on the left of the drawing, and the father standing ominously over the rabbit in the top part. You can see some more of the narrative drawings in the next two pages. Dolores holds up her burned hand. Fire is a destructive force in the novel. Dolores keeping watch at the window. One of the neighbourhood boys. Frank working out his next scam. Poor, unsuspecting Salvatore. I did not want to draw the whole image out because I know that I sometimes lose momentum when doing so, and also, the outcome becomes less exciting. Drawing directly on the paper with indelible ink has an element of risk that I like and also makes me much more mindful as to where the composition takes me. In addition, it allows my first thoughts to be made permanent, on the paper. No dithering. I think that when I draw in pencil the work has a much more considered look overall. I can rub out, redraw, recompose and reposition elements. I have found that this can sometimes result in much less visceral outcomes. So for me, it is a conscious choice in some of my work to capture my first thoughts without censorship and redrafting.

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